I’m not a seasoned business traveler so I generally plan to arrive extra early and leave a little late to avoid any last-minute stress. The problem with all that stress-avoidance is that I often have extra time on my hands and am stuck with finding ways to entertain myself.

What about you? How do you plan to occupy your extra time while in Dallas for SAS Global Forum 2015?

I was checking out the February issue of the SAS Training and Book Report Extra, and the headline SAS Training Discounts at SAS Global Forum caught my eye. There are advantages to arriving early or staying late at SAS Global Forum—you can use that time to improve your SAS skills and save!

SAS Education is offering training courses in conjunction with the conference:  six of them at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and two at the Dallas SAS Training Center. What’s more, SAS Global Forum attendees are eligible for rates as low as $399 a day. You can save hundreds for courses like “Introduction to SAS and Hadoop” or Chris Hemedinger’s “Developing Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide”.

Conference attendees can also receive a 50% discount on popular SAS Certification exams if they sign up through the SAS Global Forum registration site.

Good news, right! But you don’t have time to stay for a full SAS course?

You can still make good use of that extra time with more than a dozen pre- and post-conference tutorials. These expert-led sessions provide training you may not find elsewhere, cost less than $200 and include relevant handouts. Topics range from beginner to advanced. A few that intrigue me:

• Cleaning, Validating and Reshaping Your Data: Taking Advantage of SAS^® Tools
• SAS Studio Basics
• Power and Sample Size Computations

Of course, there’s always the option of sharing food, drinks and ideas while networking with fellow attendees!

But if you really want to maximize your SAS Global Forum discounts, register this week. Saturday, February 28 is the last day you can receive the early-bird discount rate.